Ausonius of Aquitania

• A native of Bordeaux, he was the son of Julius Ausonius, a physician of Cossium, in Aquitania.
• He was the most celebrated rhetor of the age and a refined poet.
• At the age of 30 he was promoted to the chair of rhetoric in his native city, and not long after (364) was invited to court by the then Christian Emperor Valentinian I, who appointed him tutor to his son Gratian.
• Ausonius was held in high regard by the emperor. It was no doubt during the residence of the court at Treves at this time that he composed his Mosella.
• From the office of Quaestor, and the accession of Gratian, he became successively Prefect of Latium, Libya, and Gaul, and finally, 379, was raised to the consulship.
• When Gratian died in 384, Ausonius retired to Burdigala.
• He was the teacher of St. Paulinus of Nola, but he did not approve of the latter’s conversion and retirement to Spain in 389.
• He wrote to Paulinus four letters in verse, which arrived rather late at their destination, to persuade and plead with him to return, but in vain.
• The question of the poet’s religion has always been a matter of dispute. It is questioned whether he was a pagan

who composed Christian poems out of opportunism, or a syncretist, or a Christian who by training followed pagan poetical schemes or a pagan who subsequently became Christian.

1. Certain of his poems testify distinctly to his Christianity in language that is only to be set aside by assuming the poems themselves to be spurious. Such are: a. The first of his idylls, entitled Versus Paschales, and commencing Sancta salutiferi redeunt solemnia Chrsti, the genuineness of which is proved by a short prose address to the reader connecting it with the idyll, the Epicedion, inscribed to his father. b. The Ephemeris, an account of the author’s mode of spending his day, which contains not merely an allusion to the chapel in which his morning devotions were performed, but a distinct confession of faith, in the form of a prayer to the first two Persons of the Trinity. c. The letters of the poet to his friend and former pupil St. Paulinus of Nola, when the latter had forsaken the service of the pagan Muses for the life of a Christian recluse. This correspondence, so far from being evidence that he was a heathen, displays him rather as a Christian by conviction, still clinging to the pagan associations of his youth, and incapable of understanding a truth which had revealed itself to his friend, that Christianity was not merely a creed but a life. 2. Epigrammaton Liber,a collection of 150 epigrams on all

manner of subjects. 3. Parentalia,a series of tributes to the memory of those of his family and kindred who had died before him. 4. TheMosellaa poem in praise of his favourite river. 5. The Epistolae are, on the whole, the most interesting, because the most heartfelt, of the works of Ausonious; they number 25, addressed to various friends.